A Heinous Crime, Secret Histories and a Sinn Fein Leader’s Arrest

BOSTON — For years, the researchers painstakingly recorded and transcribed oral histories from many of the leaders of the factions caught up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They pledged absolute secrecy to their subjects until after their deaths.

Carried out under the auspices of Boston College, which was founded in the mid-1800s to serve a growing population of Irish Catholic immigrants, the project aimed to provide a definitive history of a conflict with edges so sharp that people there still fear to speak openly of what they know.

Instead, court orders have undermined the promises of confidentiality, and the documents and tapes have become a trove for prosecutors, leading to the arrest this week of the prominent republican leader Gerry Adams and igniting disputes over academic freedom and prosecutorial overreach on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the basis of those interviews, Mr. Adams — the president of Sinn Fein, the former political arm of the Irish Republican Army and now one of Northern Ireland’s leading parties — was arrested on Wednesday for questioning in connection with the abduction of a woman in 1972. The timing of the arrest raised suspicions among his supporters, as Sinn Fein had been poised to make significant gains in elections in the Republic of Ireland.

Mr. Adams, who turned himself in, is being questioned about one of the most heinous crimes during decades of violence in Northern Ireland: the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a 37-year-old widow and mother of 10 wrongly believed to be an informant for the British Army. She was dragged wailing from her home as her children watched in horror, by men who made little effort to hide their identities. Her body was not found until 2003.

To this day, her children will not identify the kidnappers for fear of still-active I.R.A. splinter factions, even though some of them have said that they know who was involved and that they still see certain culprits around the neighborhood.

Mr. Adams has vehemently denied involvement and did so again on Wednesday. His defenders have criticized American courts for pursuing the documents at the request of British prosecutors.

Some in Boston, home to the largest percentage of Irish-Americans in the United States, wonder why, of all the murders committed during the Troubles, only the McConville case is being revived now. They include Thomas P. O’Neill III, a prominent lobbyist here and son of Tip O’Neill, the former House speaker who was instrumental in peace talks that ended the conflict.

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Jean McConville’s sons carried her remains — found in 2003, more than 30 years after her abduction — from a church in Belfast, Northern Ireland.CreditGetty Images

“There were brutalities on both sides,” said Mr. O’Neill, who dismissed the action as a political gambit aimed at undermining Mr. Adams’s standing in Parliament ahead of the elections. He also criticized prosecutors’ use of interviews from the Boston College project.

“For people on our side of the Atlantic to justify this by saying freedom of speech is outweighed by criminal investigations, well, that can be argued,” he said in an interview. “But not when you’re talking about 10-year-old discussions that were guaranteed in the quietude of an academic setting, and not when they are meant to reignite the harsh feelings of so long ago.”

The researchers — Ed Moloney, a journalist living in New York, and Anthony McIntyre, a former I.R.A. volunteer living in Ireland — have cut ties with Boston College, saying it sold out them and their work, called the Belfast Project. They had recorded 26 interviews with former I.R.A. members and 20 with former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group.

“It was on the basis of assurances from Boston College that their lawyers had vetted the contracts to be signed by the interviewees that said the final say in disclosure of any of this material was in the hands of the interviewees,” Mr. Moloney said on Thursday.

But things changed over the years. Two years after the 2008 death of Brendan Hughes, a former I.R.A. member who was once a close friend of Mr. Adams, Mr. Moloney published a book and produced a documentary called “Voices From the Grave,” which recounted the Boston College interviews with Mr. Hughes.

Around the same time, Dolours Price, a former member of the Provisional I.R.A., told the Irish news media that she had not only participated in the Belfast Project but had also, with Mr. Adams, been involved in the abduction and murder of Ms. McConville. (Mr. Hughes and Ms. Price had split with Mr. Adams over their belief that he had compromised republican ideals.)

These disclosures led Ms. McConville’s children to ask the Police Service of Northern Ireland for help in learning about their mother’s murder. The police in turn contacted the United States Justice Department.

By treaty, the United States and Britain are obliged to help each other in criminal investigations, except in the case of overriding public policy or national security concerns. This treaty has undergirded one of the most important international relationships in the American fight against terrorism, with the British authorities often searching houses or gathering evidence for American investigators.

Nothing in the treaty bars the seizure of university records in a murder investigation, said Thomas V. Fuentes, a former F.B.I. assistant director. “There’s nothing sacred about that, that it’s a university,” he said.

“Under U.S. law, there are no legal protections for universities,” said Noah Feldman, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “We say there should be, that it would strengthen academic freedom, but a university cannot be protected from lawful subpoena.”

The Justice Department, on behalf of the Irish police, issued its first subpoena to Boston College in May 2011 for the interviews with Mr. Hughes and Ms. Price, who was still alive then (she died in 2013). The college spent three years in court “trying not to turn over this information,” said Jack Dunn, a spokesman for the college.

Secretary of State John Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, asked then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to urge the British to drop the request, saying it threatened the peace process and academic freedom. But his pleas went nowhere.

After a final court ruling in September 2013, the college was forced to turn over 11 documents, having successfully argued the number down from the 85 originally sought.

Mr. Moloney and the college remain at a standoff. Mr. Moloney said college officials “didn’t put up the fight they should have to protect the archives and the principle of confidentiality.”

Mr. Dunn said that Mr. Moloney’s assertions were specious and that the subpoenas had been issued as a result of Mr. Moloney’s book and documentary, not any actions by the college.

With the release of the documents, the British authorities reopened inquiries into at least 16 unsolved disappearances from the Troubles. To date, prosecutors have brought charges in only one case, against Ivor Bell, a 77-year-old onetime republican who is accused of aiding and abetting the McConville murder.

Mr. Moloney said that in the end, he did not expect Mr. Adams to be charged in the McConville murder. “He has lots of powerful friends,” he said, adding that his concern was for lower-level actors who had cooperated with the Belfast Project and whose lives could be at risk if their activities became known.

Mr. Adams long ago dismissed the project, calling it “flawed and biased” and “an entirely bogus, shoddy and self-serving effort.”

Correction:

An article on May 2 about the disputes surrounding a Boston College archive of interviews with participants in the secular conflict in Northern Ireland erroneously attributed a distinction to Boston. It has the largest percentage of Irish-Americans in the United States, not the largest number. (That distinction is held by New York.)

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